A:
Sita Sings the Blues is a musical, animated personal
interpretation of the Indian epic the Ramayana. The
aspect of the story that I focus on is the relationship
between Sita and Rama, who are gods incarnated as human
beings, and even they can't make their marriage
work.

And then there's my story. I'm just an
ordinary human, who also can't make her marriage
work. And the way that it fails is uncannily similar to
the way Rama and Sita's [relationship
fails]. Inexplicable yet so familiar. And the question
that I asked and the question people still ask is,
"Why"? Why did Rama reject Sita? Why did my
husband reject me? We don't know why, and we didn't know
3,000 years ago. I like that there's really no way to
answer the question, that you have to accept that this
is something that happens to a lot of humans.
(source)

Q:Why make a feature movie out of the ancient
Hindu epic, the Ramayana?

A:
I was moved by the story and it seemed to speak so much
to my life at the time, my problems at the time. It was
cathartic to retell the story. (source)

It was a very personal project from the
beginning. Including the autobiographical bits
emphasizes that. I didn’t set out to tell THE Ramayana,
only MY Ramayana. I wanted to be very clear about my
point of view, my biases. (source)

Q:Has your Rama, your ex-husband Dave, seen
the movie? How does he feel about his broken marriage
being displayed on the ‘big screen’ like
that?

A:
He saw an almost-finished work-in-progress. I think he
understands it’s my side of the story, from my point of
view, about my feelings. I didn’t aim to speak for him,
only for me. After viewing it he told a friend of mine
he was “relieved.” I tried to focus on myself and my
feelings; I still don’t understand why either of us
behaved the way we did in real life, and I don’t think
he knows either. I like the ambiguity of the Ramayana
for that reason. It doesn’t explain why the characters
behave as they do; only that they do. (source)

Q:How did you discover Annette Hanshaw's
music?

A:
I heard her voice for the first time while "sofa
surfing" after my break-up. I was staying in the
home of a record collector in New York. He had original
Hanshaw 78's on his shelf, a friend played 'Mean to Me,'
and I was hooked. Her voice is so sweet and vulnerable
and without bitterness, even as she sings of heartbreak
and man-done-her-wrong. Also it comes from a completely
different era, separate from both today and ancient
India. Those old songs really show how the story of
heartbreak in the Ramayana transcends time and
culture.

Q:You voiced the role of yourself, and that
leads to the film's most excruciating scene, in which
your character asks your husband to take you back. Why
did you include this scene?

A:
I wanted people to feel my pain. And believe me, that's
just a little taste of it. When this sort of thing
happens to you, it's so shameful, so humiliating. Which
is why I included that scene of Sita sitting there on
the banks of the river saying, "I must have
committed a terrible sin in a previous life to deserve
such suffering." There's always a sense that, if
something bad happens to you, that there's something
really wrong with you. And I love that even Sita
believes this, because she's completely stainless,
that's the whole point of her character. I feel that
airing this stuff out is the way to take the shame out
of it. Plus, pain is funny! (source)

Making the film allowed me to get in
touch with my inner Sita. I didn’t know why I was
feeling the way I was feeling, wanting this man who
rejected me. A normal, self assured woman, I related so
much to Sita and the Ramayana, and I felt the pain of
the failed relationship could consume me if I wasn’t
careful. Basically the pain was going to burn me. For
me that’s a metaphor of pain. It can either burn you or
it can fuel something. (source)

Q:You are a self-taught animator. How did you
manage to learn all these techniques?

A:
When I was 12 or 13, I borrowed a next-door neighbor’s
Super 8 camera. I got a book called The Animation Book,
by Kit Laybourne, and I read the book and I used the
camera. So I had a little bit of experience, but I
abandoned it when I was 14. And I didn’t touch animation
again until I was 30 — 10 years ago. I picked up where I
left off, with a Super 8 camera and clay and a
stop-motion film called "Luv Is

And then I
started dating an animator — who is actually now my
ex-husband — and he had an animation table with
animation paper. I had never used an animation table
before — it’s amazing how much all this stuff has
changed in the last 10 years. At work, he had access to
a video line tester, so I did another little short film
that way. In San Francisco, this band called Nik Phelps
and the Sprocket Ensemble would do monthly performances
of live music to animation. I did a Super 8 thing, Nik
composed a score to it, and they were showing it. The
next thing you know, I’m in this local indie-film world
in San Francisco. They knew projectionists, so I met a
projectionist who helped me find 35mm junk stock, and
then I did scratching and drawing on 35mm junk stock. I
bought a 16mm camera and shot my next clay film on
16. It just kept going.

The film itself:

Q:Techies want to know: is it true that this
whole move was rendered on your home computer? What
software did you use?

A:
I started on a G4 titanium laptop in 2002. I moved to a
dual 1.8-GHz tower in 2005, moved again to a 2-by-3-GHz
Intel tower December 2007, with which I did the final
1920 x 1080 rendering. “Sita” was animated primarily in
Flash. I made some original watercolor paintings by
hand, which I scanned and animated in After Effects.
Reena Shah did the speaking voice of Sita and she also
danced. I videotaped her and traced elements of the
dance in Flash. That wasn't an automatic program, it was
all by hand. (source)

I edited everything in Final Cut Pro, so
everything became a QuickTime movie. (source)

Q:Why the choice to put Annette Hanshaw’s
voice into Sita’s mouth?

A:
It didn’t feel like a choice: it was the inspiration for
the whole thing. I was going through my break-up, I was
reading all these different versions of the Ramayana and
I heard Annette Hanshaw’s songs for the first time. They
just went to the same place, they spoke to the same part
of me. I realized that they were telling the same
story--that life is difficult and filled with love and
heartbreak. (source)

Q:Why did you mix animation
styles (the smooth cartoony style for the Hanshaw
numbers, the shadow puppets with collage characters in
the background, during the unscripted dialog, the fake
miniature Mughal paintings, during the scripted
dialog, the expressionistic rotoscoped scene just
after the "intermission")

A:
Fear of boredom, mostly. But also to hint at what a
wealth of visual traditions are associated with the
Ramayana. I barely scratched the surface. (source)

Q:The narration of the shadow puppets—how much
of that was scripted?

A:
None - it was completely unscripted, 100% real.

Here’s how I got them all in the studio: I
met Manish Acharya (Loins of Punjab Presents) through
Manish Vij…I guess Manish V told Manish A to check out
Sita, and then Manish A asked me to do animation for a
Loins music video, and part of the payment was he’d let
me record an interview.

Aseem Chhabra had written about me and
Sita and I bumped into him at the Loins of Punjab
screening. I asked if he’d lend his voice to an
interview and he said yes. He actually met Manish the
day of the recording - he interviewed him that morning
for an article. They sound like best friends who have
known each other forever, and they’re great friends now,
but they’d just met that morning.

Bhavana Nagaulapally I met at a play
reading of Anuvab Pal… Apparently, I stuck out like a
sore thumb because I was the only white woman in the
audience, and she asked, “are you Nina Paley?” She had a
great voice, and I asked if she’d consent to the
interview too. I didn’t know if she would - luckily she
showed up, and was awesome, and the rest is
history. (source)

They're all from different regions of
India and speak different mother tongues, and grew up on
different versions of the story. So naturally they
remember "the" Ramayana differently from one
another. There is no one Ramayana. Their discussion
makes this clear. (source)

Q:Why is there an “Intermission”?

A:
I had been renting old American musicals while working
on “Sita” and sure enough here in the middle of the film
comes the word intermission. It is also an homage to
Bollywood. (source)

Politics:

Q:How has the film been received among Hindus in
India and elsewhere?

A:
Some criticize the film as too irreverent, and find the
way Sita is portrayed offensive, with her narrow waist
and big hips. It is inappropriate to others just
because the film is a cartoon. Others feel that the
film focuses too much on Sita rather then Rama. In the
Ramayana, Sita is only a footnote in the story, but
obviously my film is about Sita and her
suffering. (source)

There has been plenty of feedback. Much
less negative than positive, but the negative things are
more notable. And I get it both from the far right and
the far left. The far right -- they say that they're
Hindus but I think it's not right to call them
Hindus. They think nonviolence is bullshit: "Don't
think you can walk all over Hindus, we'll violate your
ass." They send me things letting me know
that.

On the far left, there are some very, very
privileged people in academia who have reduced all the
wondrous complexities of racial relations into,
"White people are racist, and non-white people are
all victims of white racism." Without actually
looking at the work, they've decided that any white
person doing a project like this is by definition
racist, and it's an example of more neocolonialism. So
politics makes strange bedfellows -- they're in bed with
the Hindutva nationalists. (source)

Art:

Q:How have your thoughts evolved since you
first started putting clips from the film online five
years ago? You often got slammed by angry responses to
the clips. How do you think that has shaped your
thinking and the film?

A:
It sure gave me a lot to think about during the
production. It honed my philosophy. I wrote a bit about
it as I went along, like this.

I learned more about Indian politics. At
first I took every bait that came my way, but once my
blog was overwhelmed by Hindutvadi trolls, I learned to
ignore them. I also engaged in some thoughtful dialogs
with critics, back when I had time. We never changed
each others’ minds, but got better at articulating our
points of view. All the online reaction continues to
teach me about detachment. I can get just as attached to
praise as to criticism; it’s up to me whether I’ll let
it dominate my life. (source)

Q:What is your philosophy regarding your
responsibility as an artist?

A:
Some critics have said that making my movie "as a
white, American woman" I have a
"responsibility" to locate the work within a
history of colonialist oppression account for my white
privilege bla bla bla zzzzz. Yes, it's White Man's
Burden all over again. So I'd like to get clear on what
an artist's responsibility is:

An artist's
responsibility is to be true to her/his own
vision.

In other words, to be honest. That's
it.

Ironically, but not surprisingly,
similarly well-intentioned guardians of culture are also
trying to dictate Indian artists' responsibility. I
recently received a very nice email from an artist
studying in Mumbai, who wrote

There is a great deal of emphasis
here of being true to our Indian roots and integrating
that Indian-ness into our work here. Honestly I'm a
little tired of it.

I saw the same thing when I taught
animation in Nairobi. UNESCO, who sponsored the program,
wanted the participants to create animation that was
"authentically African." My feeling was that
anything they made would be authentically African,
because they were authentic Africans. But UNESCO wanted
their work to "look African", be based on
traditional folklore, set in rural villages, etc. All
this in 2004, in a big city, working on computers - many
of the participants were understandably looking away
from rural villages and towards the rest of the
world. That's what artists do, and it's just as
authentic as looking at your roots.

It's great when an artist's vision
dovetails with an honorable social cause, and is
naturally politically correct. I'm as eager to see
homegrown Indian animation about Indian history and
folklore as anyone. I'm also eager to see Indian,
African, rest-of-the-world-ian animation about every
other conceiveable subject - as long as it's honest. My
Mumbai penpal articulated it well:

I share your opinion about the
integration of identity in our work through honesty of
thought. It also ensures the fact that the end result is
truer to the context than the other more contrived
one.

A:
It’s about the songs themselves. All the research I did
was on the recordings, which are not covered by federal
copyright law, which is great. However, the compositions
that underlie the recordings are not only controlled,
they’re controlled by corporations that have no
regulation on what they can charge. For me to get
permission from them to use these 80-year old songs
would have cost me more money than it cost to make the
entire film. The songs were supposed to be in the public
domain in the ’80s, but everything’s been extended by
big media corporations for various reasons. It poses
quite a challenge to tiny little low-budget artists like
me. What they’re asking for is a really a drop in the
bucket for a big studio or a big production. But it’s
completely untenable for me. (source)

Q:If copyright is such a hassle, why don't you just
replace all those old Annette Hanshaw songs?

Q:How much were the copyright holders
initially asking to clear the compositions?

A:
What they initially quoted me was an average of $20,000
per song. There are 11 songs in the movie, so it would
require $220,000, which was more than it cost to make
the film.

Since then, they have very generously,
from their point of view, brought it down to a mere
$50,000, but there are all these strings attached, so
I'm not able to fully clear the songs.

The problem is that because I'm giving
it away for free, they might say say, "Oh, you sold
those, you just sold them for zero dollars." Whereas I
would say they are promotional copies, and only a
lawsuit would tell. So, it's in their hands; they could
totally sue me. (source)

Q:Can't you negotiate a special deal, since
this is so small-scale compared to a distributed
release?

A:
There was no way to negotiate their contract, because it
would have cost them more to negotiate than they would
have gotten from me. The contract is $3,500 per song,
and it would have cost them more than $3,500 for their
lawyers to revisit the contract and modify it.

I must emphasize this is a system
problem. This is not an individual's problem. Everyone
involved in this is truly just doing their job. It's the
system itself that is broken. If you can't negotiate the
contracts because it costs more money to negotiate a
reasonable deal than they could earn, it is crazy.

I borrowed $50,000 to decriminalize the
film, just to make it a little bit safer to give the
film away for free, which is crazy. (source)

Q:Why would corporations hang onto all these
old copyrights if they are going to make it so hard to
use them?

A:
Well, there's a good answer to that. The corporations
that hold these copyrights are media companies that also
control most of the new media that comes out. Estimates
vary, but it's said that 98 percent of all culture is
unavailable right now because of copyrights. So the
reason they hold the copyrights isn't because they want
to get paid, it's because they don't want all the old
stuff competing with the media stream that they control
now.

If you control Britney Spears, people
are only going to listen to Britney Spears if they can't
listen to anything else. That's why I think the system
is still in place.

There's so much old good music that
people would be listening to now. But if people listened
to it, what would they do with the new stuff? If culture
were freer, it would compete with people's time in
consuming new stuff. That's my theory, anyway.

I don't think any of this is conscious,
or that it's a conspiracy theory. All these rules were
developed before we had the internet. The times are just
changing so fast, business law isn't coping very
well. (source)

Q:"We'd like to purchase exclusive television
rights for your film..."

A:"Sita Sings the Blues" is released under a Creative Commons Share Alike
license, which means there are no exclusive rights
to be granted. You are already free to broadcast
"Sita" — everyone has that right.

However, I can offer my assistance and
endorsement if you share
money with me. I'm also available for extras like video
greetings, interviews, sending you HDcam tapes, etc. It's my
endorsement and assistance that would be negotiated in a
contract, not the rights to "Sita", which you (and the
rest of the world) already have.

Q:"I'd like to hold an endorsed screening. How do I do that?"

A:
If you hold a screening where you sell tickets or
collect donations, and you share some of that money with
me, then you can officially label your screening an
"endorsed screening" and you can use the Creator Endorsed mark
to show that to audiences.

What percentage do you have to share?
Let your conscience be your guide. In the case of
ticket sales, a typical figure is 50% of profits
(although of course you are welcome to send more). If
you're collecting donations, then it depends on what
you're telling the audience the donations are
for — if the audience thinks they're
donating to me, then obviously you'd have to send all
the donations (after expenses) to me. On the other
hand, it might be that you collect donations at every
screening to support your film series, but on the night
you screen Sita Sings the Blues you announce
that you're sharing some of the donations with me
because you also want to support the artist. In that
case, send me whatever percentage you feel is fair;
again, 50% is a good guide.

To actually send me the money, just use
any of the regular donation
methods. When you send it, please tell me how large
the audience was, what the total collection was, and any
other information you think might be interesting. That
will help me keep these guidelines up to date.

When you hold an endorsed screening,
there's a video you can show of me thanking the audience
and explaining how an endorsed screening works. (I'll
also tell them where they can buy DVDs!) If you'd like
to use that video, see here.

Sometimes theaters have asked me to make
a customized video greeting for their screening. I
generally don't do that anymore, because it takes a lot
of time. However, if you're holding a very big
screening and sharing a lot of the revenue with me, or
you'd like to simply pay for the custom video greeting
outright, we might be able to arrange it. Please contact
me to discuss.

Q:Knowing there were problems, why did you go
ahead with the movie anyway?

A:
I didn’t actually realize the compositions underlying
the songs would be the problem. But even if I had, I
would done it anyway, because the alternative would have
been to not make the movie — and that would have been
wrong. The fact is that I’m not rich and there’s no way
I could have gotten the amount of money these people
want. I don’t think it’s right to kill a good idea over
that.

It would have basically just functioned as
censorship. The only thing that would have happened is
that I would never have made the movie. That would have
been horrible. There’s actually a lot of art that’s
never been made because people are so scared about this
stuff. As I was making this movie I thought, if I end up
just giving this away for free, thats’ o.k. because I
need to make this movie. (source)

Q:Why did you decide to release “Sita”
on-line?

A:
The whole struggle with our broken copyright system
turned me into a Free Culture activist. I’m actually
going to release all my old “Nina’s Adventures” and
“Fluff” comics under a Share Alike (copyleft) license
too. I saw what happened to Annette Hanshaw’s beautiful
recordings: they got locked up so no one could hear
them. I didn’t want that to happen to my film. My first
concern is Art, and Art has no life if people can’t
share it.